Oakland hills' brazen burglaries raise fears

Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 2, 2012

It's not merely the rise in crime that has Oakland hills residents demanding more cops - it's the type of crime.

Burglars who once may have broken a window to sneak into a home have become much more brazen.

"I was at work, my wife was at work, it was lunchtime at 12:40 p.m. They kicked in our front door and went right through," recalled Woodminster district resident Nick Drobocky.

"And two weeks after, the person right behind us was also broken into and burglarized in exactly the same way," he said.

They're not alone.

"People in the hills are really feeling unsafe. They're feeling like their homes and their families are in danger," said Councilwoman Libby Schaaf, who recently had 250 people attend a town hall meeting in Montclair.

One of the big fears is that robbers are emboldened by the city's cop shortage and a subsequent increase in police response time to 19 minutes for an emergency call.

One Mountain Boulevard resident, who asked not to be named, told us how three burglars came through her front door in the middle of the day while her 13-year-old daughter was home alone.

"She ran downstairs to a storage unit and was on the phone saying, 'We're being robbed, we're being robbed,' " the mother recalled.

"I said 'call 911' - (so) she pushed the police button on our alarm system to get the police there automatically."

The police did respond, but the mother noted, "I got there before they did."

Occu-pressure: Political pressure is hitting Alameda County prosecutors from both sides over whether to dismiss charges against 13 students and faculty members arrested during a November incident at UC Berkeley that involved police wielding batons against Occupy protesters.

The first push came when Cal Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneausent a letter to District Attorney Nancy O'Malleystating that, while the school was not "taking a definitive position," he nonetheless urged her office "to be sensitive to the context of the campus environment and to the strong feelings this has raised on campus."

The chancellor also included a petition signed by 359 faculty members asking that all charges be dropped.

Campus police officers, who had not been consulted by the chancellor, weren't very happy when they read it.

Unlike the chancellor, they took a more private approach to get their message to the district attorney.

The center is a community court designed to punish low-level, nonviolent crimes, such as sleeping in doorways, drug use and spraying graffiti. Sentences might give offenders the option of jail time or, for example, drug rehab.

In August 2009, Adachi refused to represent people sent to the court, complaining that his staff was overworked and that Newsom had failed to provide the extra $300,000 he needed to staff the court. So the job was turned over to private defense lawyers, some of whom worked pro bono.

By all accounts, it's been a big success, handling about 400 cases at any time. Meanwhile, a dramatic drop in felony and misdemeanor filings citywide has meant less work for Adachi's office. That could mean a cut in their budget.

So maybe they could use the work.

"That's one of the reasons we began staffing" the community court, Adachi said.

But he cautioned that even with fewer cases "we can't be sure if this is just a short-term trend or something that is going to continue."

Air to sea: After months of grinding talks, San Francisco and the America's Cup organizers finally signed a deal last week to make the yacht races official. There won't be a last-minute venue switch to New York, as contemplated, for the preliminary August competition.

But NBC has asked that the second preliminary America's Cup race be pushed back to Oct. 7 so it can be broadcast nationwide on a Sunday afternoon.

That will put it smack dab in the middle of Fleet Week and the big Blue Angels air show.

It might make for a crowded day on the bay, but it would also serve up a guaranteed big crowd for the cameras.

Retired Marine Maj. Gen. Mike Myatt, who heads the nonprofit that puts on Fleet Week, calls it a "dynamite opportunity" to showcase the city, so long as it can be done safely.

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